The irony is not lost on Anais Mitchell. The Vermont folksinger released her latest album, a duet with Jefferson Hamer titled “Child Ballads,” on March 19, and on July 26 is due to have a child of her own.

“Child Ballads” doesn’t refer to ballads for children, however; the seven songs on the album come from the often dark, traditional British folk songs collected in the late 19th century by Harvard educator Francis James Child. The songs, though, have taken on new meaning for Mitchell now that she and husband Noah Hahn are expecting their first child.

“A lot of the characters in the songs are pregnant. They’re either witches or they’re pregnant or they’re fairies,” Mitchell, wearing a “Child Ballads” T-shirt, said over tea Friday afternoon at Stone Soup in Burlington. “So a lot of the songs I feel in a different way now.”

Mitchell points to the album’s second track, “Willie’s Lady,” which details the story of a man whose mother disapproves of the woman he married, so she puts a curse on the woman to give her a never-ending pregnancy. (“Oh, of the child she’ll never lighter be/And of my curse she will ne’er be free/But she will die and she will turn to clay/And you will wed with another maid.”)

“Apparently it’s a deep sort of folk paranoia,” Mitchell said of the eternal pregnancy.

Mitchell’s pregnancy has entered its final trimester, and after the baby’s birth she’ll stay off the road for awhile. She’s been busy touring England and the U.S. for most of 2013, and the last leg of her tour starts Tuesday when she and Hamer perform at Higher Ground.

Mitchell was already familiar with Child ballads such as “Willie of Winsbury” and “Barbara Allen” but her knowledge of the songs grew with her frequent tours of Great Britain. Fans there turned her on to ’70s folk heroes such as Nic Jones, Martin Carthy and Fairport Convention featuring Richard Thompson, all of whom tapped into the Child ballads.

“I fell in love with the music,” Mitchell said.

She met Hamer a few years ago and he told her he was organizing a Richard Thompson folk night in New York City, where Hamer lives. He and Mitchell suddenly realized how much they had in common musically.

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“It’s not music a lot of people are into,” Mitchell said of traditional folk ballads, “so to find a kindred spirit is really exciting.”

Burlington folk musician Robert Resnik said he discovered the Child ballads in the 1970s through recordings by Carthy and Jones, among others. “I went crazy when I first heard it,” said Resnik, host of the folk-music show “All the Traditions” on Vermont Public Radio. “I thought it was the best stuff in the world.”

Child codified only 305 old folk tunes, a large enough collection to be significant but small enough for musicians to wrap their heads around, according to Resnik. “Some of the lines just grab you by the throat,” he said. “They are so beautiful and so poetic.”

He’s happy to see Mitchell and Hamer revive the Child collection. “It has an amazing amount of legs. It’s popped up a lot of times,” Resnik said. “It still lives.”

Mitchell and Hamer talked for years about recording Child’s ballads but took their time making it happen. They tried a recording session at Mitchell’s old farmhouse in Marshfield but stopped when they asked themselves, “What are we bringing to this?” They realized after listening to Carthy’s music that what he did was so good they had to dig deeper into the songs Child collected to make their own mark.

Mitchell bought a book at the Plainfield bookstore that featured story versions of Child’s songs, and she and Hamer learned that the tales behind the songs often went in a variety of directions with alternate endings. “There is no one way to tell the story,” Mitchell said, “and that was very liberating to realize that.” She and Hamer picked the stories and musical approaches that worked best for them, and “Child Ballads” was born.

The album is a departure for Mitchell, whose 2009 “folk opera” album “Hadestown” cemented her reputation as a literary-minded songwriter of depth and detail. Instead of coming from her rich imagination, the material on “Child Ballads” all came from the minds of storytellers from centuries ago.

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Mitchell, though, thought of something her frequent musical collaborator and fellow Vermont resident Michael Chorney says, that there are only so many notes, stories and images that work in song and musicians are simply tapping into what already exists. “I felt like we were flexing our creative muscles even though we had these really tight parameters in which to work,” Mitchell said.

Resnik said he likes the renditions recorded by Mitchell and Hamer. “I’m a fan of hers anyway,” he said of Mitchell. “What it (the album) is is an appreciation.”

The tour for “Child Ballads” ends May 31, which means Mitchell, 32, will take a few months off before and after the birth of her child. That poses a conundrum for her and Hahn, who are moving back to Vermont after a couple of years in New York City. Hahn will help Mitchell and Hamer on the upcoming tour but otherwise is between jobs, meaning the growing family will be without an immediate source of income for awhile.

Soon after she learned she was pregnant, Mitchell said she called Ruth Ungar of the acoustic duo Mike & Ruthy, who will open Tuesday’s show in South Burlington. She asked Ungar, who has two children with musical partner Mike Merenda, what she did about playing concerts after childbirth, and Ungar told her she got back on the touring horse quickly.

“She was like, ‘This is how we pay the rent,’” Mitchell quoted Ungar as saying. “It’s so hard to know how it (motherhood) is going to change things.”

Mitchell hopes to spend a fair amount of time at home with the baby while also finding time to write. The daughter of retired Middlebury College English instructor Don Mitchell is even considering pursuing a master’s of fine arts degree.

She is also thinking about writing another folk opera a la “Hadestown,” a project that consumed her for years between the various stage shows and the Grammy-nominated album that includes performances by Ani DiFranco, Greg Brown and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. That form of songwriting with an overarching storyline holds great appeal to Mitchell.

“It feels like a place that you could really make a difference as a writer,” she said.